THE NEW YORKER, M AY 11, 2015
35
Chad, where, just outside the park, they
slaughtered nine more elephants before
rangers spotted their camp from the air.
When the rangers reached the camp,
three of the poachers were out hunt-
ing; the fourth escaped on foot, and his
horse was killed in the crossfire. The
rangers found thousands of rounds of
ammunition, along with uniforms, doc-
uments, and phones linking the men
to specific Army and paramilitary units
in Sudan. The poachers remained at
large. Three weeks later, at dawn, as a
group of Muslim park guards knelt in
prayer, the poachers shot them all in
the back.They seized the guards' horses
and fled to Sudan.
The Bouba-Njida attack was one of
the bloodiest massacres of elephants to
date, and represented a serious esca-
lation in the tactics and the daring of
poachers in Africa. George Wittemyer,
the chairman of the scientific board of
the conservation group Save the Ele-
phants, characterized the event as a
"significant awakening," involving "a
terrorist militia coming into a relatively
e ectively governed country and engag-
ing successfully with the Army---even,
arguably, driving it o ."
Elephants are under siege through-
out Africa. Demand for ivory is increas-
ing in Asia: once prized by Chinese aris-
tocrats, it is now sought by members of
China's growing middle class, who buy
ivory cigarette holders, chopsticks, and
even carved miniature elephants. In
Hong Kong, a hub of illegal trade, ivory
can sell for three thousand dollars a
pound.The price has tripled in the past
four years, and a pair of carved tusks
can be worth two hundred thousand
dollars. The poachers themselves are
paid much less---only a hundred or two
hundred dollars a pound---but that goes
far in Africa. Criminal organizations
tra cking in illegally obtained ivory
have sprung up in recent years, and the
money involved has begun to attract
terror groups---not just the janjaweed
from Sudan but also, according to re-
ports, the Shabab, from Somalia, and
the Lord's Resistance Army, from the
Democratic Republic of the Congo and
the Central African Republic.The over-
lap of organized crime and terrorism
has become a concern for the Obama
Administration, which recently an-
nounced an aggressive plan to involve
American intelligence agencies, includ-
ing the F.B.I. and the D.E.A., in track-
ing and targeting wildlife tra ckers.
The forest elephants roaming the
dense jungles of the Congo Basin,
south and east of Cameroon, have only
recently been identified as a species dis-
tinct from the larger, savanna elephants
found at Bouba-Njida and elsewhere
on the continent. Because their habitat
is virtually inaccessible, little is known
about them. Stephen Blake, of the Max
Planck Institute, who studied the feed-
ing and range habits of forest elephants,
refers to them as the "megagardeners of
the forest."The animals consume a great
deal of fruit, and play a crucial role in
dispersing, through their dung, the seeds
of tropical fruit trees. Blake described
to me their "extreme spatiotemporal in-
telligence," and their ability to keep track
of one another in the dense environ-
ment through the use of "infrasound,"
a frequency below the level audible to
humans. Their ivory, sometimes called
hot ivory or pink ivory, is especially cov-
eted on the illegal market.
The person who knows forest ele-
phants best is an American researcher
in the Central African Republic named
Andrea Turkalo. She has spent more than
twenty years camped out in Dzanga-
Ndoki National Park, near a bai, or clear-
ing, where the elephants congregate in
numbers unequalled at any other site. A
wryly humorous woman of sixty-three,
who wears her hair in a tightly pulled-
back bun, Turkalo has gained most of
her expertise in the field; her only scien-
tific credential is an undergraduate de-
gree in environmental studies from An-
tioch College, in Ohio. She spends much
of her time alone or in the company of
local trackers. When I visited her camp,
a few months ago, she told me that she
grew up in Taunton, Massachusetts, in
a working-class family. Her father, a Sec-
ond World War veteran, was a guard at
the Bridgewater state prison; her mother
taught in a school for children with spe-
cial needs. The Taunton Public Library
sustained Andrea from the age of six,
and she still checks books out from there
electronically and reads two a week on
a Nexus tablet. She said that she'd just
finished Edvard Radzinsky's biography
of Stalin and Caroline Moorehead's
"A Train in Winter," a history of French
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